The Bobby-Soxer (34 page)

The last of the ladies’ committee sidles past us, pausing regretfully over the large palm in the columned niche just inside the doorway, but after a whispered confab leaving it behind.

“Who sent that one?” Luray asks me. “I have that kind myself.”

“Dad and I.”

My father and I smile at each other. All the niches are now filled.

“Bet she gets a lot of flowers for free,” she says to him. “All those plays, gee you must be proud.” She turns away from him, to me. Her left profile, when arched, is boldly good. “That last one. Loved your outfits. But whyncha ever be in a musical?”

Tim has to use his handkerchief.

I say, “Nobody’s picked me for one, so far.”

The last stragglers are emerging, from corners we thought emptied, some via the back stairs. Among them are the two gentlemen from the farm, who have been upstairs to pay their personal respects.

“Hoping not to intrude!” they chorus.

They are assured that many do come nowadays—and Nessa loves it.

“Beautiful!” the younger of the two says. “Of course, we tried not to remind her we come from the farm. But at home we so often think of her … Why, Tim! Long time no see!”

My father and I won’t let on that she as frequently refers to them—as
That pair of matched bays. Who let the farm go to grass.

I haven’t seen them in years. “You two look exactly the same.” They do, both their shaven pates only a little dustier.

“He’s
been ill,” the elder says genially, “but our usual round away has cured him.”

The younger one says: “His usual. Sicily, Thessaly, Capri. Casablanca, on the side. Then New Delhi, Kashmir—and a new one, Sidney! Then back to our Swiss spa, where I fell with a thump. If he ever adds Russia I’m done for. But never say die. You heard though, about poor Rasselas?”

The dog. They do look frailer without him. “And you, my dear, they say to me, “We see everything you do. Bliss!”

One kisses his fingers to me, the other my hand. “Come see.” They nod at my father, who had been to see them two nights ago. “Bring her.” Then they sally for the exit, their eyes wiser than anything they said.

“I will, I will,” I call after them. “If he doesn’t, I’ll come on my own.”

There I can talk of Mr. Peralho, can pay him the memorial I have not yet been able to, having no one to share it with. To my father I had said, “I relished him.” Ducking away, he had managed: “So did I.”

Bill says from his periphery, “Those kind never die.”

He has hung around longer than usual; perhaps he meant to stay the night, if I hadn’t just said what he disapproves. I usually manage to.

“Just draw them, Bill,” Tim says. “That’s enough.”

Even he now knows that Bill’s silences are those of a man so sunk in the visual that some things he cannot see.

My father is not so tolerant. I may always come to Rio, he has said, but not ever with Bill. “Some do, Bill. Die. But yes, just draw. Or have a cigar.”

“Have one of mine. Of these.” Bill offers them, each in its separate tin case.

Gilbert says: “Those. Give my britches to have two of them.” He gets them.

Bill stops short at Mr. Evams, who is next to me in our circle. In spite of being unable to treat him as an equal until lately, Bill has always been afraid of chivvying him. “Smoke too now, do you? Thought you didn’t, once.” His eyes flick toward me, in sullen innuendo; of course this Mr. Evams can’t see, though the others do.

But he can hear. “Thanks, yes, I do nowadays. Occasionally. But let Gilbert have mine.”

“See you in the city,” Bill says to me, and leaves. By prearrangement with me, he will pick up “the kids” if I am performing when they come down from summer camp in Maine, but out here he rarely mentions them—as if he and I are involved in an affair which they pre-date. In his choppy lingo—born of cartoons, and the cafés that cater to “singles,” where he is one of those table adjuncts who adhere to that policy—he never formalizes them into “the children,” and they in turn, at age nine and seven, keep up a charming chatter with him, drawn from his own paperbacks. He has his apartment, which is no longer the pad. I have mine, which is no longer Mr. Peralho’s. In either place, we are entirely different with each other from the way we are here. Curious, that he should be the city lover I once plotted in my teens—the married one.

“Funny—” Tim says. “Minute Bill goes, I always feel we’ve been too hard on him.”

Luray is off to the kitchen, where she no doubt hopes to encounter the Watanabes and perhaps lure them away to work for her. Now she’s gone I don’t mind opening up to the others here: “Funny, Tim. I feel the same.”

My mother enters: she has been with the Watanabes in their quarters and is in a glow over the treasures they have brought from Japan. It was during Mr. Peralho’s gasping invalidism that she rose again, my father had told us. “Like Undine from the waters.” Though she didn’t nurse Peralho, she had kept the landscape of the sickroom full of charms against the evil day: books and games and gossip, and all the odd toys that riches could buy. She had even brought in a renowned juggler, who had enchanted her—and Peralho—by proclaiming one of his routines as especially designed for men with eyes of two colors.

Greensboro took care of its invalids with lively cackle and chronic visiting—and this was what she had done. It had cured her.

In Rio, she and my father now live quietly. She has an admirer, not a lover, an elderly Brazilian colonel of German extraction, who remembers her birthday three times over, and takes her to military balls. In appearance she is now very South American in the old style, one of those tiny macaws seemingly in mourning for Paris, who are never out of silky black. It chills me to report her to myself by appearance only, but she would wish it. She admires me for barnstorming around the theaters of our hemisphere as I can, and has once seen a performance that came far enough south, but although my father comes north for the others, she as yet has not.

At home, their view over the harbor is a vast sweep of glitter, but they stay much inside. My father, going out to shop for grapes and imported cheese, overrules the cook’s menus, sorties once a week to his card club, and pads the house in velvet slippers with coronets, fingering his small, faceted amusements the way he does the paperweights on his desk. There he writes letters to Tim on the general unfeasibility of the law, and billets-doux of praise to me.

“He’ll break out yet,” my brother says. “I open each letter like I would a time bomb. But—you know? It’ll be in a good way.”

Last night my brother informed me that he himself is marrying. For the past two years he has had a relationship with a visiting professor at the medical school, a British surgeon who had brought with him a wife. “A small dented blonde,” Tim said. “Who stayed with the child. And in our presence, him and me, spoke like one.” The husband, asked by Tim at the outset whether she knew of his extramarital tricks, had replied—“Poor dear, she hasn’t a prayer.”

That had festered, Tim said. “Couldn’t get it out of my rumpty-tum head.” Besides, half the men in his own crowd were dipping into bisexuality; it was the going thing. Though he has no intention of pursuing that. “I’m an historian. I know too much about the going thing.”

In the end it was the sight of the woman’s untrammeled gaiety with her little boy that had wooed him, plus seeing her staunchly doing her duty at those faculty functions from which the surgeon was often absent with a lover who, unlike Tim, did not have to comply.

She and Tim had discussed everything; she, was bright. Questioning herself on why she had chosen two men of the same ilk, she had decided that at home it was often a matter of whom one met; she had been taken young. She thought the same might be true of Tim.

He finds himself deeply happy in a woman’s bed. Always before he had been post-sexually depressed.
Post coitum
—Tim
est Tristram
—the surgeon had quipped. Tim and she have discussed my father, my mother; they have discussed me. I don’t press him for their verdict, although these days I am beginning desperately to want someone’s. He is too nervously intent on having mine.

As for children, they plan on having their own. “I’ll grow a patriarchal beard—” he says, smiling easier than I have ever seen him do—“think it’ll look well?”

The surgeon, he tells me, is coming out as gay, and going home to lecture about it. “He’ll describe his, er, operations, in a flowery style tipped with blood,” Tim says. “Poor dear. And go in for rough trade.”

He waits for my verdict; I am astonished to hear how much he wants it to be Yea. “Not because I’m marrying. Marriage isn’t the question, quite, is it? And if it were only for that, I wouldn’t ask you, would I?”

“No.” That reverberates in my own rumpty-tum head. Which thanks the British surgeon for what must be his word. “But I’m not a historian. I mean—I can’t seem to see—the going thing. Or go in for it.”

“You’re straight. And how you hew to it.”

“Sometimes I think—too straight?”

“No—hew on,” he says. “We all must. We all do.”

And I think: he has seen it too. He has seen the lanes people take.

“When I was in Rio—” I say. “Know what Mother said to me? Know how they sit at that window, she only by day, he only by night? She and I were watching the harbor. And she said to me in that sleep-walking way—the only time I saw her fall back on it—“Go with the weather. I never could.”

Tim and I don’t touch; we never have. But for once, even with him having to stretch to pat my cheek, or me bending down to let him, it wouldn’t be grotesque.

“Turn around,” I say. “Round and round. Slowly. Slower. Like you’re at your tailor’s.”

He laughs but obeys. His suits are still custom-made, but not so obviously. I see a small, stolid man, who in time will blend in, except for that head, whose beauty will pass. It will not forget the cockalorum path. Nor will it try to do so by disclaiming those still on the path. In the end Tim will be a distinguished man, but only for his history.

“Yes—” I say. “I’m sure of it. You’re taller.”

We both laugh until it stops hurting.

“You’re not any shorter,” he says, “but it’s okay.”

And I am glad of his verdict.

As we go into dinner, twelve strong, what with my parents and Mr. Evams, the addition of the Walshes with their Rosalie, the Watanabes, now seated at table and both watching closely the native girls who are serving us, the Austrian—predeceased by his much younger wife, and my grandmother’s closest runner-up—and of course Nessa, out of her wheelchair and loving it—I say to Tim: “Now that we two are grown, and even the others as they get older—you think we’re all becoming yea-sayers?”

He takes his place at Nessa’s left before he answers me. “Dunno. But if so—Yea.”

That was the eve. Now the day itself, Nessa’s Day, is over. We have eaten the buffet supper Gilbert has had Walsh’s Inn cater, charging it to the public domain. Nobody in town has objected to this double role, his habits there have even contributed to his election. He confuses all our interests so well.

“Fine meal, Gilbert,” my father says.

“Best Italian cold cuts—mortadella not spared, lobster mousse, mocha meringue.” Gilbert smacks lips, always red, that with the years have merged with his face. “Never give anybody what I wouldn’t want myself.”

The very last of the stragglers, an unknown, emerges from the downstairs bathroom with what must be a grandchild who has had an accident, ducks apologetically at us, and drags him off. Now even this stern house has that sleazy ease of the aftermath of a good party, the last sparkle draining down into the dirty glasses, the tinklers in the kitchen still at their task. Now surely the family is to be courteously left on its own, able to ease its corsets and shoelaces, to dabble again in the cold cuts, exchanging a “Think it went well, don’t you?”, and to say—“Phew!”

“Well, Gilbert,” Mr. Evams says, “I’ll take that ride home.”

But Gilbert doesn’t want to go. Everybody sees it. Mr. Evams has sensed it. Gilbert is mulling something, and hasn’t the nerve to say.

My mother, who hovers so well, steps forward. Like many who have given up emotion, she has replaced it with the most delicate sense of the social order. “Shoot—” she says, that dainty Southern expletive which my father says can only derive from Shit!—“Shoot, why don’t we all go out on the porch?”

All of us stare. My father says: “Is my mother safely upstairs?”

We all giggle. We know where she is. On the third floor, from which all except one of the screens have been removed at last to make room for today’s rites, the Watanabes are showing her their slides. But the porch and its furniture are famous—a three-sided veranda’s spread of matched wicker: sofas and love seats, end tables and footstools, two full sets of chairs, one lacy, one knobbed and spiked—and a contingent of heavily hatted seven-foot lamps. No vandal has ever dared this array. Nobody ever sits in it.

My mother leads the way. Half over the doorstep, she draws back. Close behind her, we too stop short. Every seat out there is occupied, in each a head bobbing, white or bald, or capped. They gaze up at us like guests at one of those summer hotels where there is always a competition for porch chairs. We must make a pretty sight, clumped there in the doorway. They keep their stare, timorous yet defiant; they know the status of this veranda and they have conquered it.

These are the ninety-year-olds, waiting for their bus.

“Why don’t you, Gilbert?” Edward Evams says. “Go on. Go ahead.”

Is he asking the mayor to disperse them?

No, never, but he has been called Ed, and in his mild, inexorable way he is taking advantage of it. He wants us to see that the Mayor Walsh of a minute ago has vanished. This is Gilbert Walsh, once of Cobble Row, in a circle of his “new” neighbors, in the town by which he is bound and thralled. He could move out and away, as many not unlike him do, all over the land. But we, who know all his greeds, have still elected him, maybe partly because of them. He will give up the restaurant for more seemly investment in the gambling casinos of New Jersey—but he cannot give up us.